Cycling, bikes and adventure
I love Audio books, both cycling related and otherwise. I spend a fair amount of time on public transport and audio books are great for that. I also like listening to audio books while riding my bike. Now I don’t want to have a debate about whether or not that is safe. You can decide that for yourself, based on where you are, where you ride.
Read MoreMy old mountainbike has been stolen. Locked in front of a grocery store. Which is a pity. It wasn’t a particular expensive bike but it was a good bike. I started figuring out what I wanted to do. Buy a new bike? Commute on my Cross bike again? I ended up deciding to buy a cheap cheap bike to do these rides on.
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How do you choose a multitool when there are more than 1000 different ones available at the big online retailers? Depends on how long, where and which discipline you ride.
First of all, lets be clear here. Most tools will work for most situations, so you won’t need to buy multiple tools. As long as you choose one with the most used tools you’ll be able to at least limp back home in most situations.
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Every new bike needs a bit of tweaking, that’s what I find. Here are the changes I have made to my Giant Fathom in the first month of owning it.
After some radio-silence on this blog, I’m back on the bike.
I’ve rekindled my love for mountainbiking and have bought a new mountainbike instead of investing in getting the old orbea up to scratch. It’s still a lovely bike and I still use it a lot.
But on to the new bike: A Giant Fathom 1 27.5 2017. I have ridden 100 km on it so far. So here is some observation about the riding on this bike, coming from a classic XC hardtail with 29inch wheels and triple chainrings and going to a slacker, more trail focused 27.5 bike with a 1×11 setup.
I have been looking for bikepacking bags for some upcoming adventures and I ended up with quite a big list of bag manufacturers.
This might be useful to others so I made a spreadsheet and noted which types of bags each manufacturer makes, you are able to sort them below if you are looking for a specific type of bag. I have noted the country of each. This is where the bags seem to be available and is most for my own shipping/customs purposes and not where the bags are made. In some cases that information was not available.
The Wahoo puck-style mounts uses zipties rather than elastic bands, which is quite annoying when you want to move it from bike to bike or only use it sometimes.
The Garmin edge pucks does use elastic bands. But we do not live in a world of standardized mount interfaces. The “wings” on the wahoo is rotated 90 degrees from the garmin and they are also a little wider than garmins so it won’t fit in.
I’m changing the grips on my mountainbike from the Race Face Strafe Lock-On Handlebar Grips to a cheap slide-on grip(called Force Lox) instead because the Strafe grips simply does not work for me. I bought them 2 years ago and they have been bothering me ever since.
Now I don’t ride my mountainbike as often as my roadbike and I don’t go on long mountainbike rides, so I have been able to live with it. And have chosen to spend my “bike bits” funds elsewhere. But since I crashed on my bike I have used my mountainbike for commuting, so now I was reminded of it every day. Enough was enough.
If you have ever had a bad bike crash then this is might be familiar to you. 4 weeks ago I suffered a bad crash while commuting to work. I hurt my knee and my hip.
The crash itself was a comically slow one. I was just riding to work and because of some road works I had to take a different route than usual. That detour led me to a tunnel under the main road that I normally cross over. What I wasn’t aware of riding down to the tunnel, was that there was about 4 cm. Of ice covering the whole bottom of that tunnel. I did not notice it in time, and tried to ride all the way through, coming up just short of the exit. The front wheel slipped under me and came down with a bang on my side.
I have ridden tubeless road/gravel tires(Schwalbe G-one 35mm) on my cyclocross bike for the past 4 months. Read about setting up the tubeless here. I have now changed back to my trusty Continental Grand Prix 4 season 28c. Since I’m changing back you might guess my opinion of tubeless setup but let’s give this road tubeless setup a 4 months review.
